Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 6 – Russian combat
losses in Ukraine are sufficiently large that they have already had an impact
on demographic statistics, pushing up to anomalous heights the number of dead
in three Russian regions in 2014-2015 and possibly prompting Moscow to send
bodies to various places to conceal just how large these losses are, Tatyana
Kolesova says.
Kolesova, who works with the
Petersburg Observers group, told Radio Liberty’s Tatyana Voltskaya that the
official figures were striking because the usual causes of mortality from accidents
and alcoholism had not increased and yet the number of dead had soared in
Voronezh, Nizhny Novgorod and Krasnoyarsk oblasts (svoboda.org/a/28156922.html).
She says that the only conclusion
she could reach was that “the appearance of this anomalous mortality in May
2014 was connected with the fact that a significant number of Russians were
participating in military actions on the territory of other countries,” in this
case Ukraine.
In these three oblasts alone, she
says, there were 6312 “excess” deaths in 2014 and 2015 than one would have
expected on the basis of figures for the pre-war year of 2013. Moreover, increases in the number of deaths
was marked in every month and not in one or two as one might have expected from
an accident or an epidemic.
And there is another problem:
officials clearly registered these deaths in these three places even if it may
not have been the case that the people who died were from there, Kolesova says.
That leads to suspicions that officials in these regions but perhaps not in
others were prepared to cooperate with Moscow in seeking to hide these combat
losses.
Given how many problems there are
with official statistics in Russia, no final conclusions can yet be drawn,
although one other expert confirmed Kolesova’s findings that the death numbers
she points to were truly anomalous.
There is no reason to assume that
the Russian government isn’t continuing to do the same thing now to hide
continuing losses in Ukraine and Syria lest Russians come to recognize what the
true cost of Putin’s wars are for them, especially given Moscow’s denial of Russian involvement in the former
and downplaying of its ground role in the other.
But there is another reason to
suspect that Moscow is trying to hide these losses: It has a long tradition of
seeking to cover up losses it doesn’t want anyone to talk about, not only
in its reports about deaths from the
Holodomor and the GULAG but in other far more recent events as well.
The author of these lines was
exposed to a horrific example of this after the violent clashes between
Armenians and Azerbaijanis in Sumqayit in February 1988 when Soviet officials shipped the bodies
of victims to morgues across the USSR so that no one place would know just
how many died and in this case how they died.
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